


Ignition

by Denzer



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: 80's AU, Age Difference, Alternate Universe - 1980s, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Attempted Sexual Assault, Ben Solo Needs A Hug, Blood and Injury, Bullying, Challenger Disaster, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, No Underage Sex, Orphanage, Porn With Plot, Psychotropic Drugs, References to Addiction, References to Drugs, References to childhood neglect, Rey Needs A Hug, Sexual Harassment, Stitches Given Without Sedative, Underage Drinking, Virgin Rey (Star Wars), Young Ben Solo, Young Rey
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-02-23 11:15:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23810689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Denzer/pseuds/Denzer
Summary: Ben nudges her upper arm with his elbow. When he looks down at her there is fondness in his expression.Soquick, she thinks, so fast that he can look at her like this.His world must be so safe.Or, damaged 80's space nerds fall in love to the backdrop of the Challenger disaster.
Relationships: Kylo Ren & Rey, Rey & Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo
Comments: 129
Kudos: 99
Collections: Reylo Hidden Gems





	1. Possibility

Ben is high the first time he meets her.

He is raking his fingers through his hair, leaning the weight of his head into his palms. He is smiling to himself, lopsided and fuzzy, thinking that he will never let anyone cut his hair again. Above him are stars. The night is clear and, as he watches, the skies seem to swirl in heady sweeps, dip toward him and pull away, over and over. The galaxy is a heartbeat, in visual.

He is so fucking high.

It takes some concentration to empty the next three cylinders. The powder spills more than once, blackening his favourite Zepplin T-shirt. But eventually, the fuse is set and the small toy attached to his creation gleams in starlight. It must go at least thirty feet into the air. He watches its ascent with a rapture he can't quite name but it feels something like freedom.

It falls back down over the garden wall. Some poor kid will find a charred toy rocket ship there tomorrow. Maybe they'll play nicer with it than he ever did.

He's looking in the direction it fell when he sees her. She is straddling the top of the wall, dressed in white and bathed in starlight, and for a moment, he sees something else entirely. He sees snow, on this hot Florida night. He sees ice-covered trees and feels the thrum of something volatile and dangerous in his hand that makes him want to clench his fingers.

Then, she lifts her leg over and scrambles down the trellis.

That trellis hadn't been there when he was a child. His mother had them put in the year he was sent to Praxeum Military Academy. There are no trees here, just profusions of night-blooming jasmine and a girl in white shorts and a sleeveless vest, obviously attempting a breakout.

“You're the one,” he tells her and she freezes as her feet hit the soil, like his voice has immobilised her. Like she might fall.

He shifts forward in his wooden chair. If he wasn't so doped, he would run to catch her. But now, he can't move. He is looking at her tense body as she shifts her weight to either foot, catching her balance. He is looking at the small, perfect round of her ass. He is thinking he is so high that he might be imagining this lithe body, dropping into his back garden like a gift from the universe.

“You're the first one to make it over that wall. I thought it was unscalable, from the other side.”

For a moment, she says nothing, and he watches her thin shoulder-blades expand and contract under that white vest.

“I saw you from my room, building the rockets,” she has not turned to him, nor have her fingers unclasped from the trellis. Her accent is foreign, British. He stays quiet, so he can hear more.

“I like rockets. I thought you could teach me how to make one.”

Ben sits back in his seat, stretching out both legs and crossing them at the ankle. His limbs feel loose, like his body might split apart or melt at any moment. This high seems to be shifting. He knew that could happen. He's heard the screams of others and watched their fingers point at nothing, in pure terror. But he's stronger than that. He won't let that tiny bag of blue powder be his master.

“That was just firecrackers strapped to a toy spaceship. You want to make real rockets, you have to be good at math and chemistry. Got a feeling that's not your thing.”

He is mocking her.

That's not what he wants to do, not really. He wants to tell her to turn around so he can see her face. He's only seen it in profile as she straddled the wall, the pointed tip of her nose, the long column of her neck, the strong line of her arm as it held her aloft.

_Look at me,_ he thinks.

In this state, he's not sure if he's said it aloud or just thought it so hard that she obeys him. Either way, she turns to face him, a frown throwing a deep line of shadow over her brow.

_Beautiful_.

Ben is staring. He has leaned forward in his seat again, like he's being pulled toward her. He is squinting and dizzy. The high is turning on him and he is suddenly, and vividly, afraid. She will kill me, he thinks, she will split my face in two and dip her hand into my chest and pull out my heart. Somewhere in the back of his head, he knows this is the lines talking but his thoughts have an unexpected weight to them that he tries to shrug off with a smug grin.

“I can describe the basic laws of thermodynamics,” she tells him, low but filled with challenge, “I understand propulsion mathematics and basic astronomy. I've just never seen someone make a rocket before... and I want to know how to do it, in practice.”

She doesn't speak like he'd expected. Her voice pulls him back from the edge of this turning trip, grounding him with its deep, undaunted conviction. He'd imagined the kids at Kenobi Home for Orphaned Children would barely be able to speak at all. His mother had spent some time ingraining in him the fact that it was only the luck of his birth that he was not in there himself. But she still made sure that the garden walls were raised by another metre when he tried to scale them before his sixth birthday party. He'd wanted everyone to come but she'd explained, in her calm, centred way, that the children there would get into trouble if he encouraged them to escape into their garden.

The girl walks toward him. He blinks away the image that comes to him: her upper arm and one half of her face coloured with a blue wash and something held aloft that makes him equal parts fearful and awed.

_Fuck_ , he needs a downer right now.

“There's something wrong with your eyes,” she tells him and it's the childish tilt of her head that brings him back to his senses. That sends a chill down his spine despite the humid air. That turns his stomach.

He wasn't a good guy, he'd always known that. He was always pulled to the violence of the world around him. But even he has limits.

“How old are you?”

Ben's voice is rough. He's twenty years old, he's been kicked out of the top military academy in the country and he's just had his third taste of Snoke's best stuff. But he's not a monster.

The girl hesitates and her nose scrunches a little. _Shit_. He wants her to do that again.

“Why does that matter?”

Ben sits back hard in his chair, meets her with a level stare, and waits her out.

“I'm almost eighteen,” she says and she is a terrible liar.

“Sure, kid.”

He feels sick. He'd been staring at her ass, he'd been focusing on her mouth, the slight curve of her hip in those white pyjamas. His mind has already gone places it shouldn't. Maybe he _is_ a monster.

“Look, _old man_ ,” she says and he wonders where her accent is from and how she ended up at Kenobi's institution, “are you going to show me that rocket thing or not?”

He laughs.

It's the drugs, it's her frown, it's the way she talks to him like she knows him already.

“I'll show you, if you can tell me the Thrust Equation.”

He blinks, realising a little too late that it's too advanced an equation and it also has a hint of double meaning. But she is speaking before he can correct himself.

“Thrust is a mechanical force which is generated through the reaction of accelerating a mass. The formula for calculating it is _density by velocity by area over mass divided incrementally by time_.”

She stops talking, her face blank, and his mouth drops open.

“How do you know that?”

His eyes flick to the outline of the orphanage behind her and the hurt blooms over her face.

“I can read.” The anger rolls off her tongue.

She hasn't been in his company for ten minutes and he's already managed to upset her. He should stand up and go back inside. He should frighten her off with viscious words or a threatening fist, maybe even a call to the home, to make sure she would never put herself in the danger of his company again. He should ignore the urge to apologise that bubbles at the base of his throat.

“Shit. Sorry kid. I just meant you're a little young to have all that info in your head. Shouldn't you be playing with dolls or something?”

“I don't like dolls,” she says and her voice drops to a whisper, “I like science. I like outer space. I like the stars.”

He smiles at her, a real smile, his muscles unfamiliar with the expression.

“Yeah, me too.”

Encouraged, she steps forward onto the deck.

“So you'll show me how to make a rocket?”

He smiles again, like he can't stop now that he's started.

“Yeah, but not right now.”

Ben is way too high to be sure why he has agreed to this, or even to be certain he will remember it in the morning. But the girl looks crestfallen, already determining that he will brush her off and not make good.

“Tomorrow night, ok? Think you can climb that wall again then?”

She nods and her chin tilts high. “I can climb anything.”

“How old are you, really?”

Ben wants to know because he genuinely has no idea. She keeps slipping in and out of his vision, warping in his hazy drug-induced stupor. Sometimes she looks like a frightened child but in the next second that girl is gone and the young woman in her place looks like she's watching him from a great height, with compassion.

“I'll be sixteen this year. I'm not sure of the real date. They picked my birthday for me.”

She is whispering again, like she expects him to laugh or be disgusted. The testy, vulnerable look she gives him twists in his gut. But he knows better than to offer pity so he nods instead, business-like and emotionless.

“I'm Ben Solo,” he tells her and reaches out his hand to shake hers. She takes three steps forward to grasp it, a much stronger grip than he'd anticipated.

“Rey Kenobi,” she tells him and he winces. The home gave their name to any child whose last name was unknown at the time of their admission.

“Where are your parents?” she asks, head titled toward the clapboard mansion behind him.

“Away,” he says and the word is clipped and sharp, “I'll see you tomorrow night then. Do you have a bag you can strap to your back? I have some books you might like.”

She watches him, distrustful, but nods eventually.

Then she's gone, running at full tilt toward the wall. She climbs it so fast he can't help but be impressed.

And even though the drugs are starting to wear off and he's beginning to sweat and shiver, he's still certain that the girl who looks at him from the top of the wall, backed by a swell of stars, is actually saying something. He hears it like a whisper, like a thought.

_You're not alone_.

* * * * *

Rey knows drunk. She knows cigarettes and hash and even huffing the last of the aerosol sprays that the home had removed once they found out what some of the kids were doing with them. She knows what all sorts of intoxicated states look like. But she'd never seen what Ben Solo had been on before. It was like he could float away at any given moment, like talking to her was the only thing keeping him on the ground.

And yet, he had put the rockets together with ease, as if he had done it a hundred times. She'd had no idea he was high until she was standing directly in front of him. It was a mistake, but she already knew she would go back tonight. He had promised her books. And she didn't think he was lying.

As she walks back to her rooms after dinner, Plutt is waiting outside her door. Rey makes sure not to slow down or give any hint of hesitation. That always makes it worse.

“Hey nerd,” he sneers at her, “show me your tiny tits and I'll let you pass.”

“Fuck off, Plutt.”

“Oh, you sound so fancy. Did your fancy mama teach you to talk like that?”

When she's in front of him, nose to chin, his eyes sneak down to her breasts and back again. She's wearing a Pepsi T-Shirt and cuffed, straight-leg jeans with high-tops. There's nothing to see. But he leers anyway, as if he's got x-ray vision.

“Well?” he says, his thick, stocky body blocking the doorway, “You're not getting in here unless I get to see something. So give it up geek-stick.”

Rey turns and runs back down the hallway. At first, she is afraid he will follow her, keep trying, but she doesn't slow down when she realises he's not running after her. She keeps going, down the stairs, out to the back of the yard, over the wall, into the cool shade of Ben Solo's heavily manicured garden.

Her breath is coming fast, her heart is pounding and she knows that not all of it is from her run-in with Plutt. She's too used to those encounters to feel all that upset by them. Too late, she realises she's left her bag in her room. The disappointment pricks at her eyes as Ben opens the french doors and steps down onto the deck.

“Rey? You're early.”

He looks annoyed but when he says her name Rey still feels a swoop in her belly that she can't quite comprehend. Ben has a book tucked under one arm and a cup of coffee in the other. He's wearing a white T-shirt with a hole in the neck and black jeans that have a chain looped at the belt. It knocks against his thigh as he moves.

“You ok? What are you doing here?”

She stares at him, and it comes into her head again, the colour black, the angry slash of red. She blinks it away and focuses on the dark circles beneath his sunken eyes.

“Challenger,” she tells him, “did you hear about it?”

He smiles, all trace of annoyance gone.

“Yeah, it was on the news yesterday.”

She twists her frayed shoe in the grass.

“They're taking a civilian with them,” she tells him and even she can hear the hope in her voice. Ben laughs and sits in the deck chair, bringing one foot up to rest on the opposite knee.

“Won't be one of us, kid. They're looking for teachers.”

He seems to notice how he's flattened her excitement as he sets his coffee cup down on the ornate wooden table.

“Still, I guess it's the start of something. A new type of travel.” There is hope in his voice too and Rey hears it as clearly as she had heard her own. She shrugs, non-committal, to null the heady sense of something kindred that is pulling at her. She looks away from him, around this beautiful space.

Rey thinks this garden, that she's seen from her window for the last few years, must be one of the most beautiful places in the world. With its walls of perfumed white flowers, it's little pockets of hedging that partially obscure stone statues of naked women or metal sculptures that leak water, the huge deck that lines the whole back of the house, painted white to match the house itself. She wonders what it must have been like to grow up with such opulence.

“No bag?” he asks her, and she shrugs. There's no way she's telling him anything about Plutt. Instead, she covers herself with aggression.

“I didn't ask for charity,” she tilts her chin high, “I just want to see how you made those toys go so high.”

He is watching her carefully, thoughtfully rubbing his knuckles over his chin, pushing at his full lower lip.

“It wasn't charity. Intelligent people need books. That's all.”

She nods, because she doesn't know what to say. Once or twice, a new teacher at her public school had told her she was smart, but it was usually said with an air of recrimination, like she was somehow cheating.

But when Ben says it, there's no emotion at all. He is just telling her what he thinks, with no idea of the craving in her belly that his words feed. There is a blush threatening her cheeks and she shrugs it off.

Ben tilts his head and looks away from her.

“Alright then, you're early but we can start now. Come on.”

He leaves his coffee and his book on the table and walks to the back of the garden.

Rey knows there's another building back there, it has a little iron rooster on the very point of the roof that spins in the wind. But it's surrounded by shrubby walls of red-flowering bushes so she has only ever seen the warm brown tiled roof from her bedroom window.

She follows with a thrill of curiosity as he leads her through the heavy-scented air. She can smell this garden from her bed. The perfume of its flowers has permeated her dreams. It makes her lightheaded to be touching the blooms now, trailing her fingers on their petals as she walks behind a tall boy whose shoulders are so broad that the white of his T-shirt stretches tight between his shoulder blades.

The building is bigger than she imagined but it's just one room with huge windows on either side that let Rey see right through to the back wall of the garden, covered in more of that white starlike flowering climbers that she loves the smell of but doesn't have a name for.

Inside the little house, Rey can clearly see a huge bed, covered in dark navy and white sheets, made with immaculate precision. There are two bedside lockers with books piled high on either one. On the opposite wall, there are ceiling-height shelves filled with even more books and a large table, stocked with a vast assortment of plastic tubing and metal canisters. Two functional-looking desklamps frame what looks to be a pile of junk in the centre. Ben has already jumped the step to the wraparound porch and is striding through the open doors, straight to the desk.

Rey stands in the grass, her eye inexplicably drawn to the bed. The sheets look heavy and they're pulled so tight that she imagines getting into it every night must be a struggle. He is rummaging through the desk when he sees her staring and he stalls in his search. His eyes dart from her face to the bed, a frown darkening his brow.

“Stay there,” he orders, and then resumes his gathering of supplies.

He emerges a few minutes later with a shoe-box full of matches, batteries, twine, plastic tubing.

“We'll do this on the deck,” he says and his voice holds a tremor of anger still, but Rey's not quite sure why. He walks without waiting for her this time, striding so fast she has to jog to keep up. He slams the box down on the table and then looks over his shoulder, not quite meeting her eye.

“I'll show you this once. I'll even give you some things so you can replicate it later. But that's it,” he tells her and Rey freezes with one foot on the deck, unsure of what she has done to make him so mad, “after that, you're on your own and you don't climb that wall again, got it?”

There is a lump in her throat and Rey isn't sure what it is at first, it's been so long since she truly felt like crying. She can't actually answer so instead pushes her foot into the deck and uses it to spin away from him, walking away with her back held rigid.

She is already climbing when he calls to her.

“Rey, stop.”

She looks over her shoulder to see him jogging toward her and increases her pace. Her foot slips. For the briefest moment, there is the weightless horror of falling. Her fingers grip tighter, digging a splinter into the pad of her thumb and her feet scrabble to find purchase.

Beneath her, Ben inhales sharply and then curses under his breath.

When she finds her footing again, heart hammering, she peeks down at him and he is holding out his arms as if to catch her, though she is only a couple of feet over his head.

“Look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings.”

“You didn't,” she calls down to him, finding her voice, “but I told you I didn't want charity." Rey wipes her forehead on her arms and stares at the wall. When she speaks, her words flow fast, tumbling over each other like falling water.

“It's just I was watching the news yesterday in the common room and the Challenger announcement came on but I didn't get to watch it because everyone wanted Sledge Hammer and when I got back to my room, I was so pissed because I don't know _anyone_ who likes science or gets why space-travel is exciting, and then I looked out my window and there you were, building _rockets_." Rey can't look at him but she can't seem to stop talking either. "I just had this idea that it meant something, that maybe you were someone I could talk to. Someone who'd understand." She wants to stay mad but her unusually honest outburst has had more of an effect on her that she'd anticipated and all the fight leaves her in one heavy breath, "But I can see now, I made a mistake.”

She starts climbing again, peeking above the line of the wall to check the yard for supervisors. She ducks back when old Maz rounds the corner of the building, her beady eyes darting in Rey's direction as if she can sense the exact location of a kid doing something they shouldn't.

“Rey, come down here,” his voice has dropped to an apologetic whisper.

“No.”

She peeks up over the wall again and Maz is standing in the yard, smoking one of her long, thin cigarettes.

On the ground, Ben has crossed his arms but, when she throws an angry glare down at him, he reaches one hand up to cover the hint of a smile with his knuckles. There is something disarming in his amusement and his wish to hide it. She wonders how long it has been since he laughed without the aid of some substance or other.

“Fine,” she huffs and scales back down. He steps away to let her jump to the ground but his hands are raised again, to catch her if she stumbles.

“Come on, kid, let's go make a rocket.”

* * * * *

“So the match-heads are for the ignition of the nitrate and the ratio _must_ be exact. Too much and you get an uncontrolled explosion, too little and it won't lift off the ground.”

He is leaning over her shoulder, watching her weigh the powder on a digital scale that Snoke had given him just last week. Ben's pretty sure he would not be pleased with its current use. Rey is so focused on the task that she barely acknowledges him. Her fingers are deft, copying the way he had ground the powders together with perfect precision.

“What about sustaining it?” she asks and her breath moves the powder on the paper in front of her so she pulls back to avoid losing any. Her shoulder hits off his arm and he stands quickly. Rey looks up, squinting in the glare of the sun behind him until he tilts his head to block it for her.

“I mean, I get that this will combust, and the plastic will direct the energy down, for upward momentum, but the one you made last night went thirty feet into the air. There's gotta be another component, a stabilising chemical, so that the whole thing doesn't blow at once.”

He stares at her and exhales a puff of air through his nose.

She wrinkles her nose in confusion. What had she said that was so funny?

Ben looks away immediately, pulling a battery from his back pocket. He hands it to her and crosses to the other side of the table.

“Open it.”

But Rey already has the pliers in her hand, working the top off.

“Zinc, magnesium, potassium blend. That's genius!”

Her face starts to hurt for smiling so hard but she can't seem to stop now and Ben is looking at her like he's in pain or something. She wonders if he is craving some more of whatever he had taken last night.

Finally, when the powders are sufficiently blended and she has them folded into the hard plastic tubing with the dipped wick secured, she looks over at his silent, hunched form in triumph.

“What next?” she asks and he smiles as he leans forward, the line of his shoulders curling forward as he ducks his head.

“Decoration,” he tells her, like it's some wicked thing they are about to do.

She feels a twinge in her belly, something that spreads out like wildfire and emerges in a burst of giggles that shocks her. Rey doesn't giggle. Her laughs are heard-earned and rare, offered only to those few people that she trusts. Finn, Maz and Rose had taken years to get a laugh out of her. She's known Ben for less than a day. She is so stunned by the sound that she stifles it almost immediately with a quick shake of her head. She's about to apologise but Ben is already up, kicking his chair back and striding across the deck into the main house.

She blinks at his sudden departure, looks around the empty garden and wonders if that was a dismissal of some sort. By the time he returns, Rey is hovering uncertainly, half out of her chair.

“Where you going?” he asks her as he hefts a cardboard box onto the sooty table, “You get to pick the projectile.”

He motions toward the box and leans back from the table to watch her. Inside are hundreds of toy spaceships. Some are replicas of Nasa-built rockets, others are recognizable ships from movies set in outer space. Rey's never seen so many pristine toys in one place before. She dips her hand in to trawl through them and picks the one that makes her buzz with excitement, the familiar oddly-shaped spaceship from her favourite movie.

“Not that one,” Ben says quickly and she blinks up at him.

“Of course not,” she tells him, with an outraged frown, “That would be sacrilege!”

He smiles again and points to the box, directing her attention to the task. She picks a perfect model of Apollo 13, holds it up, and weighs it against what she thinks will be the amount of thrust produced by their homemade fuel.

“Fifty feet,” she says, with a potent burst of defiant excitement, “I'll bet you.”

He raises his chin slightly, looks down his long nose at her. There is a moment of weighted silence.

“What are you gonna bet, kid?” he asks, smiling, and then seems to immediately regret what he'd said. The change is so swift that Rey has trouble following it. He narrows his eyes, shakes his head and rubs at the back of his neck with a tight frown and lips that are working as if he's biting the inside of them.

There is a meaning here that Rey vaguely understands, an underlying current that pulls at her. But, in this moment, it feels like that same twitchy apprehension she gets when she's in an enclosed space with Plutt and she knows, she _knows_ , this isn't the same thing at all. She won't allow it to be.

“I don't have anything to bet with, Ben,” she tells him, refusing to look away, like this is a street fight and she is about to sink a knife into his stomach, “It was just an expression.”

He doesn't respond. He's looking at the box of toys like he wants to pick it up and fling it at the wall. There is something happening to him that he seems unable to control, like some monster is eating at him from the inside out and Rey finds herself again wondering what he had taken last night and how long the effects of it might be lasting.

“Jesus,” he says eventually, and it sounds like a breath, like defeat. He sits down hard in his chair, slumped and loose-limbed. He stares at the floor between his feet, head low, “Just light the fucking thing.”

Rey breathes into the thrum of dread that writhes inside her chest like a physical thing.

“No,” she tells him, quietly, “Not like this.”

He buries his head in his hands.

She watches him for a while as he kneads his fingers through his dark hair.

“What's with your hair anyway?” she asks him, her voice suddenly overly bright.

He looks up and his eyes are glassy, confused. Rey thinks she could break him in half if she wanted to right now, like one mean word could shatter him and someone else would be standing in his place.

“You're always touching it.”

She mimics his movements, over-exaggerating them, sliding one hand after the other over her own tied hair, and rubbing the back of her head until her ponytail is a mess of loose, flyaway hairs. She is smiling at him, ducking her head toward him and _willing_ him to keep looking at her until the light comes back into his eyes and his mouth curves into an amused smirk.

“They shaved it,” he tells her and there is no small amount of wry bitterness in his voice, “at military school, when I was seventeen. It was not a pretty sight.”

“I imagine you haven't cut it since,” she says and cheeks are sore from smiling again.

She laughs to bring him back from whatever edge he had been standing on. And eventually, he is laughing with her, brief and quiet.

“Alright, kid, let's see how well you've built your spaceship. Strap Apollo 13 to the side with that duct tape.”

* * * * *

They launch it from the bottom of the deck.

It soars into the air above them as they stand side by side at the foot of a mansion under the dusky Florida skies. Rey watches it with a surging in her chest, excitement and pride and pure joy all swelling up like a flood until she thinks it might drown her. Sixty feet, at least, it rises. Far above the roof of the orphanage, flaring until it peters out in the dim light and encroaching stars.

_Possible_.

It's what they both feel.

Rey already knows she's in trouble. She's been here for hours. They will be looking for her by now. But this was worth it. This feeling like she can do something, make something, be something.

Ben nudges her upper arm with his elbow. When he looks down at her there is fondness in his expression.

So _quick_ , she thinks, so fast that he can look at her like this. His world must be so safe.

“That was more than fifty feet,” he tells her quietly, the hint of an unsaid apology.

She takes a breath so full that the sides of her ribs flare, looks at the dissipating trail of smoke that lingers in the still, humid air.

“Yes, it was.”

When she scales the wall, she has a toy in her pocket that she will feed into the tear in her mattress to keep it safe. A starship from her favourite movie, handed over gently, like it was precious, or like _she_ was. It is worth every second of the two-month lock-down she receives for breaking curfew. It’s worth spending her sixteeth birthday alone, eating a Marathon Bar that Finn had slipped into her pocket after dinner, a stubby birthday candle punched through the wrapper.

Every night after dinner, when Maz's key turns in her bedroom door, not to be opened until morning, Rey goes to the window and watches Ben Solo in his garden, learning every line of him, every movement, until she feels she knows the shape of him better than her own.

She is waiting, and that has always come easy to Rey.


	2. Sorry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben pushes Rey and she pushes back HARD. 
> 
> I have no excuse for the delay with this second chapter except that I introduced and new and very stupid rule where 80% of the fic has to be written before I post it. However, now I'm tipsy and I love this story and I'm putting it out there in flagrant defiance of own my crappy rule. It's not 80% finished. But I still love it. 

“That was brilliant!” Rey pulls her feet from the coffee table and sits crossed-legged on the couch, adjusting until she is facing Ben and leaning forward as if proximity will emphasize her point. “It makes me want to go to the arcade, just in case. I'm pretty certain I'd be great at blasting alien ships outta the sky.”

“I thought you'd like it,” he laughs, then moves away from her like he always does, standing up to rewind the video for the store.

Rey hadn't noticed at the start, how he'd pull away whenever she came near him, finding odd excuses to put distance between them. But then, the coffee incident had happened and now she couldn't stop seeing it.

She'd been jumping the wall twice a week for two months by the time Ben had noticed that Rey never accepted anything but a glass of water as they poured over books and reconstructed the experiments of his adolescence with varying degrees of success. Once he'd figured out that Rey would rather salivate while watching him drink a latte than accept what she considered charity, he had forced her to learn to use the coffee machine in his huge kitchen. That way, he'd told her, her job could be to make their coffee and he'd pay her with math and chemistry lessons.

He'd been leaning over her shoulder, showing her the buttons on the overly-complex machine, when she opened the expensive-looking tub he'd handed her. Rey had never smelled anything so rich and earthy. The husky noise she'd made as she stuck her nose in the tin was as involuntary as it was elongated. When she'd finished, the kitchen was deathly silent and Ben's fingers were stalled halfway between the frother and the espresso filter.

He'd turned his head to blink at her, pursing his lips to suppress a smile.

“You OK there, Rey?” he asked with one raised eyebrow. Her cheeks had pinked up and she'd looked at him out of the corner of her eye, her gaze trained solely on the short distance between his mouth and her shoulder.

Ben was not a playful guy. He was serious and reserved and so intense that Rey constantly found herself acting more vivacious around him, as if to balance his personality. But something came over him then, an involuntary snap in his stoicism, and he'd reached around her to tap the bottom of the coffee can. Rey's nose had brushed along the grainy rim and the sandy granules had stuck to the skin of her upper lip. She'd inhaled them on a sudden gasp and Ben had jumped away from her. He'd laughed as she'd dragged her forearm over her mouth, a full throaty chortle, with his hands raised in apologetic defence. It was the most relaxed thing she'd seen him do since she met him and her response was immediate, unthinking.

She'd chased him with the coffee, around the fancy kitchen island, threatening to upend the entire thing over him. In the background, the gurgle of the expensive machine punctuated her cursing.

“Such a potty mouth,” he grinned at her, gripping the opposite end of the island, feigning one way then the other as she'd watched him hawk-like, can held out from her body with both hands.

“Ben, just take it like a man,” she taunted him, “you know you deserve it.”

He straightened, glowering at her in that particular way of his that told her he was more amused than angry, and stalked slowly toward her side of the table. It was his movement, the shift of his shoulders, the drop of his chin so he was looking at her through the dip of his brow, the steady set of his footsteps as he closed the distance between them. His switch from prey to predator was instantaneous and Rey felt a twist in her belly, a hot, tight sweep. Her muscles tensed, holding her in place, unsure of whether she'd wanted to run or step forward. The coffee can wavered in front of her and her face was fiery hot.

He'd stopped, inches from her, looking down with a fading smirk as he took in her dilated pupils, her shortened breath, her white-knuckled grip on the silver tin. All that playfulness had vanished in an instant, replaced by an anxious confusion that Rey instantly wished she could soothe. Instead, she had turned to the coffee machine and tried desperately to steady her hands.

“Fine. I'd need a step-ladder to dump this over your head anyway.”

She'd seen more and more of that lighter side of him after that and every time she caught a glimpse of it there would be a responding weight in the dead centre of her chest, like a pendulum they held between them. But even now, weeks later, sitting to watch a movie, he'd made sure to place himself at the opposite end of the couch, with bowls of popcorn and Reece’s Pieces and Rey’s favourite candy cigarettes mid-way between them, like a barricade.

“Well,” she tells him now, as he places the tape back into the plastic box, “if the trailer-park kid in The Last Starfighter can make it to outer space, maybe there's hope for a gutter rat too.”

It’s a joke, something to make him grin and shake his head in that way that transforms his steady features into something younger and shyer, but it has the opposite reaction. His gaze shoots to hers, locked and unblinking. Whatever emotion is behind it narrows his eyes and freezes her in place.

“What the fuck, Rey? That's not what you are.”

She waves her hand between them, tearing her eyes away and muttering something about Ben taking a chill pill. She knows it's a dangerous line to take with him. What he does in the evenings when she's not with him is a subject she hasn't ever referred to, but she says it anyway, hoping to distract him. It doesn't work, not even a little. He comes toward her and steps over the coffee table. He sits down on the mess of their candy wrappers and Rey watches the sliver of space between his knee and hers, ignoring how he's ducked toward her, trying to force eye-contact.

“Hey, I mean it, Rey. You are a gifted kid in a shitty situation. Don't talk about yourself like that. 'Cuz it's not true.”

Words of comfort, spoken with Ben's usual quiet intensity. Later, when she'd have time to think about it, she'd wonder what part of it she had reacted to most, his defence of her, or the way he'd called her a kid.

She puts her hands out and shoves him back from her. He stays seated, angled away as she pulls her legs out from under her and awkwardly comes to her feet, fists clenched by her sides.

“You don't know a thing about me, Ben.”

He looks up at her, confused and hurt, and there have been so many moments like this. Times when she'd seen him stumble around his garden, barely able to walk in a straight line, muttering to himself in liquid murmurs until he fell asleep on the garden bench. When she saw him like that, she'd make sure to jump the wall the next evening, when she'd find him quiet and tired and vulnerable. Those were the times he'd let her lean into him when she handed him his coffee. The times when she knew that one cold look would crack him like glass. 

For the briefest moment, she wants to. She wants to break him open and pull at his insides until there is nothing left of him that has any power over her. Ben seems to brace himself for it, tensing his jaw against whatever horrible thing will drop from her mouth and into his chest like salt in an open wound. But it doesn't come. Rey sits back down with an angry sigh.

“Everyone thinks they know me. What it must have been like before the home took me in, what it feels like to not even know your own real name or your own fucking birthday. Everyone thinks they get it... but they don’t. To understand, without a doubt, that you weren't -”

She cuts herself off with a savage full body shake and Ben's arms raise from the table, hands held half-way between them. He's going to touch her, to hug her, to pull her against him, and let her feel this awful feeling while wrapped up in the heat of his body.

It's going to make her feel small and protected, to be held that way. It's terrifying.

He stalls, unsure of what to do when she hardens her features and glares at him with all the ferocity she can manage.

“No-one really knows me. Certainly not some over-educated trust-fund baby with too much free time and too much self-pity to function.”

She had tried so hard this time, not to hurt, not to lash out in response to comfort. But it's the only reaction she knows and not even Ben is safe from it. No-one who gets close to her ever will be. Finn's skin has grown so immune that she can rip him in half and he will still put a hand on her arm and draw her back. But Ben is new to this, and already so broken.

She's up and running through the kitchen before she can look too closely at the damage she's done, knowing that Ben's expressive face would show it like a knife-wound. He's calling to her, walking after her as she grabs her bag from the deck and tears across the lawn. Rey couldn't stop running now if she'd wanted to.

* * * * *

She watches again, for weeks. That first night he is so unsteady on his feet that he doesn't make it to the pool-house at all. She watches him lay face-down in the grass, out cold. Rey stays there for so long, debating whether to cross the wall and help him up, that she falls asleep in the window. She wakes to the thin sound of his furious cursing as he gets to his feet before the sun is even up. He is paler than she's ever seen him, even from this distance. The front of his t-shirt soaked through. He is shaking hard and Rey has to look away when he throws up in the bushes. He doesn't look toward her window once.

After that, he comes home later and later. He doesn't stay in the garden in the evenings and the only time she sees him for any length of time is at the weekend, when he sits outside in the afternoons to drink coffee and read. He faces away from her window and Rey wonders if he's trying to keep from looking up at her or if he is so angry that he is punishing her by keeping his face hidden.

She stays in her room so much that Finn starts making excuses to see her. Technically, boys aren't allowed on the girl's side of the dorms. But Maz has found them huddled together in her room so many times over the years that she stopped punishing them for it long ago.

He has a specific knock, one formed very quickly after she'd opened the door to him in a towel, thinking he was Rose. Every time she hears it, it makes Rey feel a bit better. She doesn't even have to see him before the surge of happiness hits her. She opens the door, already smiling.

“You know,” he says, leaning on the doorframe, “you're gonna have to tell me what's got you cooped up in here some time or other and I figure, that's gonna be tonight.”

The bottle he holds in his hand makes a liquid _glug_ as he sways it back and forth in front of her face. Vodka. Gross. She smiles and holds the door open wider.

“I have some cans of coke under the bed.”

At first, they talk about school, about how they hate not having the same schedule now that Rey's been moved up. She'll graduate the year before him. That conversation ends abruptly because they both know what happens to the kids who graduate and Rey's not ready to talk about what she'll do once her place at the home is given to the next poor kid. They talk about movies instead and that leads Rey to slurp vodka incessantly while Finn demonstrates his Indiana Jones moves. When he's settled beside her again, quiet and waiting, she tells him about The Last Starfighter. She gets so into the space battle descriptions that she doesn't see the sharp-eyed look he gives her at all. 

“Where did you see that? I don't remember us getting it?”

Rey nods into her drink, feeling the burning in her chest that is slowly softening her edges.

“A friend rented it. I see him after school sometimes... but not anymore.”

Finn stiffens beside her, she can practically hear the sudden rush of his thoughts as he grapples with the fact that she has kept something from him and Rose.

“A friend, huh? Anyone I know?”

“No. He's a little older. Not in school.”

Finn turns to her then, the warning in his face clear before he even opens his mouth. She holds up a hand between them to stall him.

“It's not like that, Finn,” she says quietly and somehow the warm fuzzy feeling of her third vodka is already loosening her tongue, “and I've ruined it already anyway, so you don't have to worry about me. And don't go spilling to Rose either. It's finished.”

Finn has a way of asking a question without saying anything at all. At the start, it was the thing she liked best about him. He was curious but knew enough to hold back and allow her to let go of things in her own time. And he always gave her something in return, a piece of her awful past was always reciprocated with his own horrible memory so she'd know that she wasn't alone.

“He tried to be nice to me, to tell me I wasn't a gutter-rat when I made a joke about it.”

“Ah,” Finn said, his head tipping back and his arm reaching out so she could tuck herself into his side, “what a jerk!” With her face pressed into his shoulder, she could smile and hide the wobble there easily.

“I think I might have overreacted.”

She feels him suppress a laugh, “No way! You, overreact? Never!”

She turns her face to look up at him. “You think he'll forgive me?”

Finn's whole face softens and Rey wonders when she started to allow that look without immediately trying to move away from him.

“If Rose can forgive me, then this schmuck can forgive you. Though, how much older are we talking here, Rey?” 

Rey ignores him, getting to her knees and taking a huge, preparatory slug of the vodka mix.

"What does Rose have to forgive you for?”

Ducking his head into his free hand, Finn's shoulders shake with laughter.

“I thought it was a good idea at the time,” he tells her and looks at his knees. Rey knows what's coming because there is a line between his eyebrows just thinking about it so it can’t be anything other than what Rose had already told her. He shifts uncomfortably when he looks back up. He's on his fourth glass of vodka, teetering on the edge of serious and giddy.

“Look, I don't wanna say exactly, but she was thinking about doing something, with me, and I was _totally_ into it, and I wanted to show her I was into it, so I bought something that we would need to do the thing that Rose wanted to do and then I... wrapped it up and gave it to her like it was a gift, you know, for her. Somehow, I misjudged how seriously she was taking the whole suggestion, and instead of making her laugh, it made her really, _really_ mad and she didn't talk to me for, like, three days.”

He's laughing in earnest now and Rey is rolling her eyes and sitting back against her bed. She has already heard this story, from Rose's point of view and with much less laughter but she doesn't want to tell Finn that. She's in the middle, again, and it's not a place she feels entirely comfortable.

“Finn, did you buy condoms for your girlfriend and then give them to her like they were fucking flowers?”

He laughs so hard he snorts vodka down his shirt and Rey decides this is the end of the night. They knock back the last of the bottle and she pushes him out into the hallway. Before he goes he turns back and drags her into a too-tight hug.

“Anyone who doesn't want to hang out with you isn't worth your time, Rey.”

“Get out of here before you get us both in trouble.”

It's already after lights-out and when Rey closes the door. She refuses to go to the window again, though the draw of it is almost incessant. Instead, she sits at her desk and takes out her art paper, and spends almost thirty minutes making sure her writing is legible. She sticks the sign up in the window with her eyes squeezed shut and then goes to bed and lets the vodka do its job of spinning her until she falls asleep.

* * * * *

She doesn't get up in time for breakfast the next day. Her head is pounding so hard that she almost misses the knock on her door. When she drags herself to open it, Rose is standing in the hallway with a tight expression and a plate of fruit, granola, and yoghurt. Rey's face must show some sign of distress because Rose takes it easy on her, for once.

“Finn tried to take you down with him, huh?” she says as she shoulders past her into the room, “What's that?”

She's pointing at the sign in the window and Rey scrambles past her, over the bed, to rip it down and scrunch it into a ball.

“It's nothing.”

Her face is blazing red, her hands are shaking from too much alcohol and if she doesn't drink some of that water in Rose's hand in the next three seconds, she might throw up.

“It said 'sorry' – why would you hang a sorry sign in your window? What's going on?”

Rose puts the glass of water into Rey's outstretched hand and she drinks the entire thing in one go. Then she curls up on the bed with her back to the window.

“Nothing's going on. I was drunk, is all. Finn's fault, as always.”

“Sounds about right. Did he tell you what he did?”

Rey peeks out from where she's turning her swollen face to the pillow and Rose hands her a strawberry that tastes more delicious than anything she could possibly have imagined in her semi-nauseous state. She sits up to eat another and Rose plonks herself down beside her.

“Did he even seem sorry about it?”

Rey speaks with her mouth stuffed full of dripping red fruit, tilting her head up slightly so the juice stays in her mouth, earning herself a scolding look.

“He was very contrite.”

After a steady glare that lasts far longer than Rey is comfortable with, Rose decides to stop that particular line of questioning and turns to look out the window instead.

“Well, that's weird...”

Rey almost drops the bowl of fruit, twisting to see what has scrunched Rose's whole face into an expression of confusion. There are toys in Ben Solo's garden, dozens of spaceships, all lined up to form letters in the grass. Rey feels that familiar swooping sensation in her stomach that she can't blame on the hangover and she smiles for what feels like the first time in weeks, with her nose pressed against the warm glass.

_Me Too_.

* * * * *

“Hey,” Ben says, and Rey notices that he's showered for the first time in days. His hair is wet and the ends curl over the collar of his shirt. An actual shirt, black and soft-looking, and she wonders if it came with one of those piano ties. She has to press her mouth so he won't see her grin.

“Hey, yourself,” he tells him, suddenly hesitant and uncertain, “Listen, I just wanna say…” There’s a twist in her chest and, for a moment, Rey thinks about turning tail and running for the wall that separates their worlds. But she doesn’t. “That night, I shouldn't have said-”

He cuts her off by holding up his hands and taking another step toward her. Rey holds still and allows him to approach her as if she were a wounded animal.

“You were right,” he says, “I don't know all that much about you. Not enough to tell you what you can and can't call yourself.” He comes to stand in front of her, hands by his sides, “And I am a trust-fund baby, or at least, I was. So...”

Rey has to tilt her head to look up at him. He looks tense, almost cross, but Rey knows him well enough now to understand that this expression is pulled into place to cover what he’s actually feeling, which is worry. She takes a deep breath and gives him her best forced smile, still awkward and unsure, hoping to pretend it never happened at all.

“OK, we're both sorry. Look at this.”

She takes the article from her back pocket. It lists all the candidates, their photographs, what they teach, and each of them has a small paragraph about what space travel would mean to them. That's the section she likes the best and she reads out highlighted lines to him as he watches. It takes a few minutes for that cautious look to fade from Ben’s face. For it to be replaced with something more amused, less tense.

She keeps reading, even when he motions her toward the deck and goes inside to make coffee. She follows him from cupboard to cupboard, reading the most hopeful comments, the ones that she underlined because she thought he might like them too.

“Who's that one?” he asks when she reads a particularly sweet line about wanting to see the world from afar so she knows just how little our biggest struggles mattered to the universe. How that would give her comfort.

“Barbara Morgan,” she read the name from under the picture of a young woman with a mega-watt smile, “Pretty _and_ smart.” She said it to herself but Ben is looking at the page over her shoulder and, as soon as the words leave her mouth, his face jerks toward hers. She doesn’t look at him, staring at the grainy photo instead, and she tries to prepare herself for whatever he is about to say.

After a long moment, he moves away from her. He busies himself by taking the espresso from under the drip and re-filling the filter.

“Yeah,” he says in a voice so low she can barely hear him, “she is.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to [RedRoseWhite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedRoseWhite) for the beta of this chapter, that she did a million years ago. Please expect more in the near future (sorry!). 
> 
> I tried so hard to write the remainder of this fic - which will be around eight chapters - without posting until it was almost finished but, it turns out, that is actually really boring and difficult. It's really helpful to hear what people think of what works and doesn't AS YOU'RE WRITING, so I'm going to edit what I have and post it regularly and hope that the thrill of having it made public gives me the rush (and insight) I need to complete it and bring these to poor nerds together in a lovely soft ending. Because, if it doesn't have a soft, happy ending, I AM NOT INTERESTED. :-)
> 
> I'd really appreciate any advice you have and if you want to come say hi to [me](https://twitter.com/DenzerWriter) on Twitter, I would love that!


	3. Tether

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey is frightened after an encounter with Plutt and jumps the wall at night to ask Ben for help.
> 
> TW // mentions of past neglect, drug-use, attempted sexual assault (if I've missed something, please let me know)

Rey is trying not to be irritable. She is  _ really _ trying. But Ben’s hovering again, watching her like a hawk, breaking her concentration when he leans over her shoulder to move her cup away from the live socket, or poke at a screw she’d already checked twice.

His fingers are shaking today, involuntary little jerks that have already made him cut through two wires and ruined their circuit twice. She’d taken the snips from him so she could remove the casing herself and he’d lit a cigarette, a new habit that also irked her. He only ever smoked when he’d been out late the night before, with the friends he wouldn’t tell her about, even when she asked nicely. 

“Those are sharp,” he’d warned her, and she’d rolled her eyes but said nothing. 

When she leans down to inspect her work, he moves her back, two fingers tipping her chin up away from the blade.

“I get it, Ben,” she huffs at him, “It’s sharp, but I learned to use scissors when I was six and it’s been ten whole years-“

“Nine,” he cuts her off with a warning look that makes Rey grit her teeth.

“Ten. I’m sixteen.” Rey tries not to be irritable, she really, really does this time, but her voice pitches higher in what is, most definitely, an irritated lilt. He frowns at her and when he speaks again, all the warning is gone from his voice, replaced with something that sounds like hurt. 

“When was your birthday?”

Ben gets overprotective on the days his hands shake, and little things upset him more. Or maybe he’s just better at hiding it when he’s not working through whatever he’d taken the night before. Rey softens immediately, beaming up at him like a little kid proud to hit the point where they can add three-quarters to their age.

“Months ago.”

He smiles back but his eyes don’t catch it and he slumps in his deck-chair.

“You should have told me. I would have got you something.”

He would have, Rey knows. For him, birthdays were a real celebration, held on the day he was actually born. She wants to tell him that it’s just the day she was found, that she was so malnourished when the nurse had examined her that they couldn’t determine her actual age. Her intake forms at Kenobi had specified “estimated age 4-6 years” and Maz had started her in preschool as if she were four to give her a fighting chance to catch up. But telling Ben this today, when his eyes were already verging on glassy since the moment she’d arrived, was out of the question.

“You did give me something,” she says instead, sweeping her hand over the table he’d packed with electronics so she could build a circuit to power the LED’s she’d built into the shape of a Christmas tree.

It doesn’t cheer him up. If anything, it makes him worse. He swallows hard and crosses his arms over his chest, bending one leg to rest his foot on the chair and partially block his face from her. Rey goes back to the board, clipping the casing from the wire as if she can’t tell he’s trying to pull himself together. What she wants to do is throw her arms around him. But Ben hardly ever allows that. He’ll ruffle her hair if she gets excited about the latest Challenger news, or accept short thumps on his arm if she’s teasing him. Once, when a tough experiment that had defied her for weeks had finally gone her way, she’d run at him, shrieking, and Ben had lifted her from the ground with a full laugh she could feel against her stomach, spinning her around as if she’d just won a gold medal at the Olympics. Rey had felt that laugh in her gut for weeks, but he’d never done it again.

After a few minutes, Ben gets up quietly, leaving her to work as he goes into the house. Rey’s forgotten about him by the time he comes back, so focused on the circuitry that she doesn’t even hear his footsteps on the deck. It’s getting chilly, close to dark, so the flickering light he sets on the other side of the table is what finally catches her attention.

It’s a cake, a small swiss roll that wobbles a little as he sets it down. There are candles set all across the top, in careful little lines. She doesn’t need to count the blaze before she’s up, grinning from ear to ear and he’s smiling too, goofy, as he rubs the back of his head.

“Happy Birthday, Rey.”

For the first time in her life, Rey blows out candles without that background sense of sadness that usually dulls her smile.

And she makes a wish.

*  *  *  *  *

“You're a fucking little sneak.”

He's cornered her on the back stairs. He must have followed her from the kitchens and waited the whole time she was gone. Rey has been slipping in and out the prep-room door since her lockdown ended, avoiding Maz and everyone else. She's been clever about it, making sure she doesn't get caught again but Plutt has always watched her too closely.

There are two solid tomes that Ben had loaned her in her backpack. If she can slip one strap off her shoulder, she has a chance of landing a solid blow and running past him. She grips the frayed band and adjusts her elbow.

“What the fuck do you want, Plutt?” she spits between gritted teeth, trying to inject as much venom as she can.

“You know what I want, gutter-rat,” he's called her this ever since he'd found out where the social worker had found her as a girl, and usually she can let it roll off her back. But now, it has a slick edge that Rey recognises as danger. Plutt leans forward, blocking her view of the stairs, taking up the air in the tiny hallway, “And now, you'll to give it to me.”

There is a hard, sly twist to his mouth and he leans even closer to her. Rey can smell the stale garlic of his breath and the cheap deodorant that isn't doing much to cover the fact that he never showers. Her stomach keeps dropping and turning over on itself and the urge to scream bubbles in her chest.

“Get the fuck away from me, asshole.”

If she shouts, her voice will shake and she cannot show weakness here, so Rey whispers it with a furious conviction that surprises her, considering how much her fingers are shaking. Plutt laughs a waft of putrid breath into her face.

“You're going to come with me, now, or you're never getting over that wall again. How 'bout that, bitch?” He clamps his hand around her upper arm and Rey's entire body locks in place, rigid as a vice. She can't scream, she can't even whisper. She is racing through her options with a laser-like focus, ignoring the insistent tug of his fingers, urging her to follow him down into the basement stairwell.

It's dark down there. She could try to push him down the steps but she doubts she could yank her arm free of his grip. She'd probably fall along with him, not a good option. She could try to talk him into going back upstairs, but it's unlikely he’ll agree. He's holding the arm that she had been planning to swing at him and his legs are angled as if he knows that her knee is itching to slam into his groin. She can hold her own in a fair fight but Plutt is bigger and bulkier and, now, he has a hold over her that no-one else does. He can take Ben away.

“Who's down there?” Maz's voice, like a lifebuoy thrown in a raging ocean, “It's ten minutes to lights-out. Is that you Mr. Plutt?”

Rey can hear the woman's thin footsteps on the stairs. It's like music, each click of her heels on the bare wood a relief. Plutt takes his hand off her and shoots her a look that darts straight to the door and back again. The message is clear: If she talks, so will he. And then Rey will never be allowed to jump the wall again.

“Rey? What are you doing back here?” Maz is peering at her now, from her perch on the bottom step. Her eyes seem twice their actual size behind her oversized red plastic glasses.

“I was just grabbing a drink from the kitchen.”

Maz stares for a moment longer and Rey can feel her legs trembling.

“Well, up you go, then.” She tilts her chin to indicate the stairs behind her and Rey moves as fast as she can without running, Plutt on her heels. She hears Maz call as they reach the doorway to the main hall above, “Mr. Plutt, I'd like to talk to you for a moment, young man...”

Rey doesn't wait to hear more, she races through to the empty common room and down the hall beyond it to the main staircase that leads to her room. With her hand on the rail, she expected the panic to leave her, but her heart is pounding so hard she can hear it and her legs feel jittery and weak. There are bright spots at the edges of her vision and it is suddenly hard to breathe.

_ Ben _ .

It's not a thought. It's an impulse. There is no rationale behind it, Rey simply cannot lift her foot to make that first step onto the stairs. She takes none of her usual care as she turns back and retraces her steps. In the hallway, she pushes through the main doors and out into the yard. When the air hits her, her legs move of their own volition, racing along the stony ground, hugging close to the shadow of the building, and sprinting out across the pockmarked basketball court. She launches herself against the wall, climbing heedlessly until the pads of her fingers are burning. She can't breathe. The air is coming in small gasps as if she has been running for hours instead of a short dash.

At the top of the wall, Rey scans the garden. The house is dark and there is no sign of Ben. There is a sobbing sound that she knows is coming from her but she can't make it stop. She scales down the trellis and her gulping cries get louder. This impeccable garden with its cloying smells and drop-heavy flowers usually offer safety and comfort but right now every rustle of leaves could be Plutt, right behind her, though she knows he’d never be able to make that climb.

Ben's not in the house.

There is no earthly reason for her to know where he is. He could be out with his mysterious set of friends, or he could be reading in the little library under the main staircase, or he could have fallen asleep watching TV where she'd left him less than an hour ago. But he’s not in any of those places.

Rey turns from the house and darts over the warm grass to the poolhouse. He's there, like the end of a thread she is pulling on to show her the way. She sees him through the window, bent over his desk, hair falling forward so she can't see his face and she needs to see his face. Right. Now.

She's up on the deck and scrabbling uselessly at the sliding door handle when Ben whips toward the sound. Rey freezes in place. Her hands have gripped the metal. Her breath has stopped altogether. He is frowning at her, angry, reaching to cover what he was doing with some thin blueprint papers. Half-twisted in his seat, his lips push out as if her name has caught in his mouth.

_ Help me _ .

Rey doesn't say it out loud but she is screaming it with everything she has in her shaking body. Ben's face changes. The anger at her intrusion distorts and there is fear there now, concern. His hands uncurl from fists as he takes the room in two strides and pulls the door open wide.

Rey is sure he says her name but she can't hear anything but the rushing of her blood in her ears. She wants to throw herself against him, for him to pull her into the room and close the door behind them so that nothing can get in. She wants to catch her breath against him and feel the steadiness of his heartbeat on her cheek.

But Ben isn't wearing a shirt, the wide expanse of skin radiating heat that she can feel on her face and chest, even from a foot away. She can't look up at him, meet his eye. He's talking, the tremor of panic making his voice higher. But the words are wavering and unclear in her ears and she feels like she might be drowning.

He reaches out to put his hands on her shoulders, hunching over, forcing eye-contact, and Rey flinches hard. She fights the instinct to run because this is Ben. And Ben is kind. He wouldn’t ever grab her arm and try to force her into a darkened stairwell. He wouldn’t hurt her, ever.

Even if she did run, she can't go back to her room, on the same floor as Plutt. She can't.

But she can't touch Ben like this either, not his bare skin, not now.

“Can you put on a T-shirt or something?” Rey’s voice is shaking so hard that the words tremor and distort.

He straightens, watching her for a long moment, making no move toward the shirt that's draped over the back of his chair. He tilts his head to peer into the dark garden behind her, as if something might be chasing her. When he looks back at her, his frown is as deep as Rey has ever seen it. 

“What happened?”

She shakes her head because she can't tell him, but she finds she can't stop shaking it once she's started. She doesn't want to see what his reaction will be, doesn't fully trust whether he would be angry or concerned or whether he would laugh it off because nothing really happened at all, did it?

She's not hurt apart from the scrapes she got dragging herself over the wall. A tender spot on her arm from where Plutt gripped her is hardly a reason for this breathless, panicked state she has found herself in, is it?

She feels ridiculous now, young and stupid and weak. There are tears hot in her eyes and Ben steps back into the room, away from her. He grabs his shirt and stretches it wide over his shoulders.

“Rey-” he turns to her and she is standing right in front of him, having followed him into the room like she's tethered to him. When he pulls his shirt down Rey throws her arms around his middle and finally, finally, she can take a breath without feeling like it might break her chest open. She takes several, loses count of them, and Ben says nothing more. He crosses his arms over her back and rests them there, steady and unmoving, while a damp patch spreads quietly over the material of his shirt.

Eventually, when Rey's breath has returned to normal and her muscles have stopped shivering of their own accord, Ben pulls her into his side and moves them to sit at the end of his bed. She is tucked under his arm, his fingers resting on her forearm with his free hand splayed over his thigh. She can feel him looking down at the top of her head and she knows what is coming. He'll want answers now and she is still not ready to give them, might not ever be, to him. He must feel her sudden dread because he doesn’t push as hard as she’d expected.

“Rey, if you don't want to tell me what’s upset you, that's OK,” he says softly, “But, I think you'd feel better if you did.” As he talks, he squeezes her against his ribs in a slow, gentle rhythm that is more soothing than Rey would have thought touch could be. “I know  _ I'd _ feel better if you told me, because right now I wanna punch whatever did this to you and I'm gonna need some direction for my fist,” He's trying to get her to laugh, ducking toward her so she can feel his cheek against the top of his head. She gives him a sobbing huff of breath that is all she has right now in lieu of a laugh and he, of course, takes it the wrong way.

He moves back a little to stare down at her.

“It’s not something  _ I _ did, is it?” He’s frowning, hard, eyes flitting between her and the blueprint papers on his desk, “Did I say something weird or do something you didn’t like?” His fingers tense on her arm, “Rey, have you ever come here at night before? Aside from that first time, have you ever jumped the wall late at night? You shouldn’t come here when-”

She has to stop him talking, to put an end to this train of thought that will make her cry if he keeps going with it.

“I’ve never seen you high, Ben,” she tells him and his eyes widen, fingers sliding off her shoulder onto the bed behind her, “Not since that first night. I’ve seen you from my window but I’ve never jumped the wall when you’re out of it like that.”

He is quiet, shoulders hunched in, clenching his hand on his thigh.

“You know about that?” he asks the floor in front of him, but his voice is flat, as if he doesn’t expect an answer.

“Of course, I do.”

He eyes his desk again, jaw twitching like he wants to lash out. He’s not touching her anymore but Rey has stopped shivering now. Her breath is steady and her muscles feel like her own again. She didn’t mean to but somehow, she has made him feel bad, right after he made her feel better. Quickly, she tries to fix it.

“Ben, you don’t have to talk about it either. But you  _ can _ talk to me, if you want to. I’ll listen and I can help you. I’ve seen detox before-”

He stands up fast, cutting her off, and paces the room. Rey watches him but he doesn’t look at her once, focused on the floor with a scowl that could melt the boards. Minutes pass this way before he seems to remember himself. The desk chair creaks worryingly when he flops down into it and he finally meets her eye, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

“What happened, Rey? Why were you so upset?”

Rey is good at pretending things didn’t happen too. If he wants to ignore what she said about his drug-use then she can do that for him. Now that she’s stopped shaking, her voice comes back to its normal level and she finds herself walking a thin line between telling the truth and keeping her guard up. It’s getting harder to do that, with him. 

“It’s nothing. Just a boy I live with. He can be an asshole.”

Ben stands up fast.

“Name,” he says and Rey has never heard him speak with such low ferocity. She blinks at the unfamiliar set of his jaw. When she doesn’t respond, Ben’s hand tightens at his side, almost forming fists. “Give me the little punk’s name. I’ll make sure he doesn’t come near you again.”

Rey is already shaking her head before he’s even finished speaking.

“Ben,” she holds up her hand and steels herself against his anger. Even if it’s not directed at her, it makes her nervous somehow. She doesn’t want him to offer her violence. She has enough of that. “I don’t need that. I can take care of myself. And if I get into any kind of trouble at the home, they could move me, and then I’d never see you or Finn or Rose again. So please, please, don’t do anything, OK? I feel better now, I just wanted…”

Him. She just wanted him, but she can’t say that so Rey shrugs instead and attempts a smile to demonstrate how much better she feels.

It takes him a moment to calm himself, to ease out his fingers from fists and take the tension from his shoulders. He watches Rey as he does it, like he’s trying to mimic her steady breathing.

“What are you gonna do if he scares you like that again?”

“Same as I always do, I’ll run. I’m good at running.”

“And if you can’t?”

Rey looks at the door, considers showing him just how good at running she can be. But then, Ben might follow her. There is something wonderful about that thought, that he’d care enough about her to come after her. It makes her want to hug him again. Instead, she whispers, “That won’t happen.”

He nods, once, determined, and stands up. “Do you know how to protect yourself if it does?”

Immediately, Rey’s eyes flick to his crotch, because that’s exactly where she would aim a hit if she needed to. Her cheeks warm when she realises what she is looking at and Ben laughs gently.

“There’s a good start, Rey. Would you let me show you more?”

Rey agrees because Ben wants to show her something and it makes him happy when he’s teaching her things, even things she already knows. She nods her head and, just like that, they add a self-defence class to their twice-weekly science lessons.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not sure why, but I am really self-conscious about this fic so every time I update it, I get really nervous! But tonight, I'm a bit woozy from cold medicine so it's not as bad, hahaha!
> 
> Advice and constructive criticism are very much appreciated and thank you to everyone who takes the time to read it. 
> 
> Huge thanks to[AuroraReylo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuroraReylo/pseuds/AuroraReylo) and [LoveAndBalance](https://twitter.com/Love_andbalance) for the beta and kind encouragement! 
> 
> Please come say Hi on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DenzerWriter)


	4. Ethanol

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An experiment goes wrong and Rey has a choice to make. 

“Good. Heel of your palm to my nose, as hard as you can.”

She smashes his hand, held at the same height as his face, a few inches to the side. She’d only managed to break one arm free of his hold but it’s her left arm, her stronger, so the hit slams into Ben’s open palm with all the force she has.

“Yes!” he shouts, mouth wide, “Perfect, Rey!” 

He’s taken to enthusiastically growling at her when she exceeds his expectations and it’s the opposite of what should make her happy but Rey never questions the giddy leaping in her stomach when she hears it.

“Knee to groin... but maybe not so hard.” He’s laughing as she jerks her leg up into his blocking hand. Rey would have pulled back but he’s careful after their first session, months ago, when he’d underestimated her reach and she’d connected, leaving him curled on the ground for a full ten minutes.

“Excellent,” he tells her, “You picked it up so fast.” He’s shaking his head at her and Rey feels the weight of his hard-earned approval sinking in her belly so that heat rises all around it. Her cheeks flush. Now that they’ve stopped, Rey is hyper-aware of just how close they are. Ben has one arm wrapped around her back, holding her wrist to the base of her spine. His other arm is slotted between them, grasping her knee, long fingers wrapped around it. Rey is swirling again, the muscles in her legs weakening to a worrying degree. It happens so often now that she’s almost grown used to it, but this time it’s more intense. Where his fingers are resting, tucked into the back of her knee, is sensitive and she has to fight the urge to squirm.

He drops his hold, fast, and steps back from her, much further than he needs to. He does this every time Rey stares at him, like whatever look she gives him in those moments makes him panic. She’s frozen, watching to see if he’s angry. He gets that way sometimes. He’ll go quiet and place himself at the furthest distance he can. He’ll gently answer her questions until it’s time for her to leave but won’t talk apart from that. Rey hates it.

“OK, that’s enough for today,” he tells her and strides past her to pick up the box of clinking bottles he’d put aside earlier, “Let’s get started on the science!”

He dips his shoulders in an odd half-dance and sounds so enthusiastic that Rey finds herself flooded with a mix of relief and affection that is quickly tinged by annoyance. It’s not fair that so much of her happiness balances on him. It feels wrong to keep her distance when all she wants to do is reach out, but it’s worse when she tries to push contact and upsets him. Sullen, she follows him to the pool patio, watching as he sets out bottles and old, yellowed tubing. As usual, the fluttering in her belly calms when she tries to work out what he’s doing. Steadiness through distraction and curiosity. 

Ten minutes later, the smell of the chemical is enough to make her throat catch and Ben squints at her, trying not to laugh at her exaggerated gagging.

“It's ethanol,” he tells her, and Rey immediately knows where he's going with today's session. She lets him get about a third the way through his explanation before she blurts out the chemical equation for the reaction. He gives her a huff, the high-pitched one that means she's surprised him, and tilts his chin up to roll his eyes. The top half of his face moves out of the shadow that the garden wall throws across the poolside deck. In this new slant of light, his eyes are a different color and his skin doesn't look as pale. It's strange, how something as small as a change of position can do that.

“OK, smartypants, so where are you going to get the voltage from?”

She glances at the rolled out heat-resistant mat where Ben has placed the equipment. There are several options but she reaches for the soldering iron first because that's the one she knows.

“What's this, 25 Watt?” 

She offers him the question like an apology and, as always, he doesn't accept it. His face moves out of the light and his eyes change color again, so dark it's hard to tell where his pupils are focused, if he's looking at her forehead or her mouth or just at some distant point beyond her.

“You know what voltage it is, Rey.”

It's her turn to roll her eyes.

“Alright, but I'm gonna need a conductor. Got any nails or a piece of aluminum in here?”

She reaches for the small box that Ben had placed just beyond the bottles.

It happens so fast that, at first, all she can understand is the sudden shift of her perspective. One moment she is looking at the plastic box, fingers hooking through the contents. The next, there is fading, blue sky, and ringing in her ears, and weight across her middle, pressing her hard into the wooden slats that rim the pool.

Her arm is burning... her arm is really  _ burning _ .

Ben's face swings up into her line of vision. He's looking at her stomach. He's frantic, lips forming a curse she recognizes but can barely hear. His shoulders move, repetitive, with such intensity that she wonders if he even knows what he's doing, or if he's on some sort of autopilot as he pats up and down her ribs and legs, turns her face from side to side, checking the back of her head where it hit the wood.

It seems to take forever before the tinny sound abates and she can hear him cursing in a panicked litany. There is smoke at the side of Ben's neck, curling over his shoulder. She tries to sit up and the pressure over her middle is there again, pushing her down.

“Rey,” he is shouting, as if he's not two inches from her face, which is good because she can barely hear him, “You're OK. There wasn't much left in the bottle. Fuck! What the fuck was I thinking?” He pulls back to check her arm again and she watches the muscle jump in his jaw. Another wisp of smoke dissipates beside his ear.

“I don’t think there’s glass in there but, you might need stitches. Can you stand? We gotta get you to a clinic. Shit. Fuck, I'm so sorry-”

She sits up fast, ignoring the twist of pain in her bicep as she raises her hand to his shoulder.

“Ben,” she tells him, dazed and dizzy, “You're on fire.”

She pats at his black T-shirt, afraid of hurting him. The smoldering remnants of the material burns her palms. Ben doesn't feel it, still focused on stemming the flow of blood from the flesh wound in her upper arm. But there are dark red spatters on the boards beside him and, with a cold jolt, Rey notices his t-shirt is darkening in a wide circle on his side. She presses gently, and understands what’s happened so quickly that her mouth snaps shut. 

“Ow!”

He's looking down, annoyed, like she'd pinched him. Like he doesn't understand that by throwing himself in front of her, the shard of the exploding ethanol bottle had hit his torso first, before glancing her upper arm. He'd been so focused on the inspection of her wound that it had not occurred to him that he might also be injured.

There is a fragment embedded above his hip bone. She moves the hem of his T-shirt out, away from his skin, and up, over the glass, so the sweep of blood on his abdomen is revealed.

There’s so much of it that her voice won’t come out any louder than a whisper. 

“This is bad.”

“Oh, shit.” He sounds surprised, voice soft and breathy.

Worriedly, Rey presses a hand to the center of his chest and the angle of his body immediately adjusts. He'd been hovering over her, on his knees. But now he folds into himself beside her, as if the pain had only reached him when her words had allowed for it.

“It's OK,” she tries to reassure him but she doesn't know where to place her hands or how to stop the bleeding. She should know exactly what to do. The home had given a first aid class last month but when the TV was rolled into the room on a two-tiered trolley, Rey had been surreptitiously reading an article about the Challenger crew, paying more attention to keeping the magazine page hidden behind her biology book than what was on the screen. She angles the web of her thumbs so they cover the glass shard. It cuts into her skin but she keeps pressure there because that’s the only thing she can remember to do. But it’s not enough, because Ben is paler than she’s ever seen him. There’s a sheen on his skin and his hands are curled limp over his chest, barely moving with his shallow breaths. 

“Ben. I have to go call an ambulance. But I'll be back. Ok?”

He's blinking slowly, looking at the sky.

“I'll come back. I just need to call for help. It won't be long.”

“Pager.”

He has to say it three times before she understands what he means. The little box that had appeared on his belt two months ago and now never leaves it. She shakes her head at it until he speaks again. 

“No hospitals. Rey, please, page Snoke.”

It's a name she doesn’t recognize. He's never said it out loud before. But she knows who it is. She feels the cold run under her fingertips and down her spine and she knows exactly who he means. It’s where he gets it from, this thing they never talk about even when Ben’s eyes are so bloodshot he has to hide them under sunglasses or when he’s so exhausted that he’ll spend an afternoon watching her amuse herself with the experiment he doesn’t have the energy to show her how to do properly. Rey is angry suddenly, with nowhere to direct it. She presses the wound, harder this time, until her blood is mixing with his. 

“I'm not calling that fucking asshole, Ben. You need a doctor.”

His fingers overlap around her wrists, moving her hands away. Slowly, he twists onto his side and painstakingly gets to his feet, ignoring her attempts to stop him from moving. 

“Rey, I can't show up in the system and they can’t test my blood today. Go home. Get your arm looked at. I'll be fine.”

It’s the most forthright he’s ever been and Rey is mute in the face of it. She watches him hobble toward the house, the foot of his injured leg turned slightly inward. He looks so guarded, so entirely alone that her shredded fingers clench in her lap. There are small flecks of his blood on the wood behind him and Rey knows there’s a choice to make now. What she does next  _ matters _ , though she’s not sure exactly why. She could go back over the wall, her arm will hold her weight and Rose will bandage the cut without any of the caretakers finding out. She could leave Ben to fix this himself. Or she can follow him. 

As she looks, he crosses one arm over the other, the tips of his fingers just visible, digging into the tender skin on the inside of his arm. Rey gets up and jogs to catch him up, tugging his arm over her shoulder. He doesn’t stop her, doesn’t even grumble, and she’s surprised for a moment, because he always stops her. It’s how she knows, for the first time, what fear looks like in Ben. It looks like stillness. 

*** * * * ***

Snoke is tall and thin. Rey is looking at the center of his chest when she opens Ben’s front door, though she’s drawn herself to her full height. He’s wearing a leather jacket similar to Ben’s, but shinier. He smells like stale cigarettes and his hair is so slicked back and thin that he seems almost bald. Rey ignores the urge to cringe from him. Instead, she lifts her chin and glares. She’d thought it would make him stop leering at her, but it doesn’t have that effect. If anything, Snoke seems amused by it. There is another man behind him, tall and lanky with red hair that droops over his forehead. He’s holding a green medical bag.

“Where is he?” Snoke asks, pushing up the sleeve of his jacket.

Rey doesn’t want to answer, doesn’t want to let them into Ben’s house. But it’s what he’d asked for. “Through there, on the couch.”

When she doesn’t move back for them, both men brush by her, the younger one knocking her shoulder so hard she has to take a step back with a glancing sting from the cut there. Judging by the pain, Rey thinks Ben might have been wrong about there being no glass in it.

He’s been delirious for the last fifteen minutes, eyes rolling, blood seeping between her fingers as she’d pressed her hands to his side. The room had been filled with her panicked breath and his slow, quiet exhales that came with slurred words and fluttering eyelids. He’d been lucid for a few seconds at a time, telling her to leave before Snoke got there, asking if she was hurt. She  _ was _ hurt, and scared, and her stomach was rolling and knotting like it was tearing its way out of her. But she wasn’t afraid for herself.

The red-haired man takes a cursory look at Ben’s side and says “He’s fine,” with a curled upper lip, “I’ll stitch him up.”

Hovering in the doorway, Rey watches as Ben's shirt is pulled up to his neck and a dark orange solution is swabbed across his stomach, dripping onto the leather couch. He doesn’t move, though his eyelids flutter.

“Here?” she asks in a high-pitched squeak, “You’re going to do it here?”

Snoke reaches down to turn Ben’s chin back and forth before giving his cheek a sharp smack to rouse him. Ben gives a barely audible groan and Rey is moving forward like he’s called to her, shoving her way past Snoke and dropping to her knees beside the medic.

“He’s out enough for stitches, Hux,” Snoke says, “Don’t waste the sedative.”

Rey feels like she’s dreaming, like she’s not really here at all. She watches Snoke walk to the end of the couch and lean over it to press his weight onto Ben’s ankles, holding him down. Hux looks annoyed as he reaches into the bag and takes out plastic-wrapped cotton wadding. He tosses it onto Ben’s chest before going back for a curved needle and glossy, black thread. Bored to the point of irritation, he loops through the eye of the needle with swift, jerking movements.

The shard of glass is jutting from Ben’s side and Hux wraps a piece of gauze around the jagged end. When he looks up, it’s only to sneer at Rey, “Hold his arms.”

She is frozen, horrified. Ben’s hand is on the floor by her knee, his other arm wedged between his uninjured side and the couch cushions.

“You can’t do this,” she whispers and it’s Snoke who responds.

“Fucking hold him!” 

It’s a roar so loud that Rey jumps and Ben’s eyes snap open. He sees Snoke first and lifts his head, finding Hux. When his eyes lock onto Rey, Ben tries to move, eyebrows raised and mouth open in dismay. Before he can speak, Hux presses one hand to Ben’s hip, the other pulls the glass shard from the wound. Whatever Ben had been about to say dissolves into a guttural snarl. 

He lifts his upper body from the leather, hand shooting from the floor to paw at the stream of blood that pours from his side.

Rey can’t move. She can’t even breathe. Her mouth falls open and she brings both her hands up to cover it.

“Hold him, you stupid bitch!” Hux screams as he grabs Ben’s wrist and forces it down on his chest, standing so he can lean his weight onto him. Ben is heaving, cursing, gritting his teeth, eyes rolling but still fighting. His blood is pooling on the plush, cream carpet.

Rey moves on auto-pilot. She shoulders Hux out of the way and hunches over Ben, bringing her knee to his forearm and pressing him back onto the couch. Her blood-streaked hands come to either side of his face. He tries moves to see around her, to growl at the red-haired man.

“Ben, look at me. Look at me!” She’s inches from him, shouting. He tears his eyes away from Hux and stares at her. Instantly, his labored breath slows to a heavy pant.

“Shouldn’t be here…” he slurs, but then his body tenses and Rey has to press hard to keep him in place. She can’t see but Hux must have started closing the wound because Ben is desperately trying not to scream into her face, eyes so tortured that she brings her forehead to his so she can stop herself from whimpering. 

“It’s OK,” she whispers, “it’s gonna be OK.”

He doesn’t answer but Rey feels the jerk of his stomach as the needle is pushed into his flesh again and again. It’s unbearable. She pulls away to glare at Snoke.

“Give him a sedative! This is torture!”

Snoke ignores her, looking at Ben with a dark grin, “Quite the little spitfire you’ve found us, Solo,” he says and Ben freezes beneath her. He’s so tense she can’t tell if Hux has stopped working or if Ben is just not reacting to the pain anymore.

“She’s just a stray,” he says, and his voice is strangled but strong, “she’s nothing.”

He won’t look at her after he says it, though he must feel Rey lift her weight, pulling back to stare at him. She is so shocked she can’t speak, can’t cry, can’t give in to the urge to slap his blank face into some semblance of emotion. She doesn’t hear Snoke’s reply. For minutes, she watches Ben and for minutes, he keeps his eyes downcast, brow furrowing with every stitch, but unmoving now.

At last, Hux is finished and Ben’s eyes are fluttering again, exhausted. Rey stands, taking the pressure off his chest. She hasn’t taken a step before Ben’s arm shoots out, eyes still closed, hand grasping the back of her leg. His middle finger and thumb touch above the joint of her knee. 

Snoke sees it, eyes dipping low to where he is holding her, and then to Ben’s face. He laughs quietly but doesn’t say anything more about it. Instead, he switches to commenting on Ben.

“You took that well,” he says, patting roughly at one of the ankles he’d held down. “Good man.” Rey watches him take a packet from his pocket, a small square baggie, half-filled with a blue-tinged powder she’s only glimpsed once before. Snoke leans forward over Ben’s legs to hook the drugs deep into Ben’s jeans pocket in an oddly intimate gesture. Ben winces, Rey can tell he wants to look at her but won’t let himself, and he gives a fleeting nod to Snoke in response. 

Standing still, caught by Ben’s hand and her own creeping shock, she watches the two men leave, unfocusing her gaze to ensure she doesn’t make eye contact. Not with them and not with Ben either. She’s concentrating on the weight of his hand, on how, despite the urge to run from the room, the warmth of his palm is still comforting. As the front slams shut, Rey can already feel herself start to close off from what she just witnessed, to pretend it didn’t happen at all. She’s always been good at that. But Ben won’t let her. 

“You weren’t supposed to stay.” 

His voice is scratched and torn and Rey thinks of how pained he’d sounded when he’d called her a stray. An animal no-one wanted, one that he’d fed and couldn’t get rid of. 

“Well, I’m glad I did. It’s better knowing what you really think of me.”

His fingers tighten and Rey knows it’s involuntary because he takes his hand away immediately and uses it to jam his T-shirt down over his bandaged stomach. 

“I didn’t mean that. I was just trying to…”

“Protect me,” Rey finished his sentence. Now that he’s not touching her, what comes next will be easier. 

“It didn’t seem like I was the one who’d needed protection, Ben. No-one was holding  _ me  _ down for a surgery that should have taken place in a sterilized room.”

He tries to sit up but thinks better of it, holding a forearm over his face instead. 

“I’m fine,” he tells her, and even Ben must be able to tell that it sounds ridiculous. There are leather couches here, a television that has its own stand, complete with shelving for his favorite films, all lined up like thick books. There’s a gilt mirror over a marble fireplace and pinewood ceiling that traps the cool air from three fans. There’s no way that a boy who grew up in this place should be anywhere but a hospital when he gets hurt. 

“Ben,” she asks, dropping to her knees beside him, “What are you doing with those guys? This isn’t you.”

There's a moment, one Rey will remember all her life, where Ben wavers. His lip trembles and he raises his arm to turn glassy eyes up at her, beseeching. He's in pain, exhausted by it, and it makes him more open than Rey has ever seen him. It hurts her to look at him so she leans forward. She’s sure she meant to press her cheek to his, but instead, her lips smudge against the corner of his mouth in a way that makes her whole body tense. 

It’s so fast. How quickly he closes down. One swift jerk of his hips and he’s turning on his side, away from her and into the couch. He’s mumbling. It takes her a long time to work out that it’s an apology and a dismissal all at once. 

“I’ll make this up to you, Rey. I will. Just not right now.” His voice sounds thick. 

On shaking legs, Rey goes to the kitchen. She grabs a bottle of water from the fridge and a box of the cereal bars he never stops eating and places them on the coffee table beside him. He’s not asleep, Rey can tell by the way he’s breathing, and his hand is cupped over his jeans pocket where the thing that’s breaking him is tucked away. If she could bring herself to feel something now, she’s sure it would be rage. 

For the first time, Rey walks out Ben's front door, instead of climbing the back wall. His driveway is winding, massive profusions of hydrangea and magnolia in bursts that seem entirely unmanaged. She doesn’t know the number for the fancy gate at the front of his property but the wall is lower here. It takes nothing to climb it. It’s easy to scale down onto the wide sidewalk and wander away like nothing was wrong at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may have noticed that the Moodboard for this fic has changed. That's because the wonderful [PattiGreen](https://twitter.com/PattiGreen2) took the time to put a better one together and I love it so much I could screech! Thank you so much!!!!!
> 
> Also, huge thanks for the beta and wonderful encouragement of [Rush](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuroraReylo/pseuds/AuroraReylo) and [LoveAndBalance](https://twitter.com/Love_andbalance) \- both of whom write amazing fics and everyone should read them. 
> 
> I couldn't be more of a nervous nelly about this fic so all constructive criticism is hugely welcome and I promise not to sit on the next chapter like I did for this one! 
> 
> As always, thanks so, so much for reading and please come say Hi on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DenzerWriter)!


End file.
